This week's issue of The Stranger features a tabloid- style "tell-all" written by someone named BEN BISHOP, evidently formerly employed as a hotel bellhop. Obviously, he will never be employed as such again. A bellhop's most sacred duty is to employ discretion while meeting the needs of weary travelers overwhelmed after hours, days, or weeks on the road. If a man requires, say, the services of a flaxen-haired masseuse of Swiss heritage, with her hair roped into thick braids, in order to assuage the hardships of the road, it is the bellhop's job to provide the aforementioned Elsa, no questions asked and no stories told out of school. But yet again, The Stranger acts as if matters of integrity are some sort of joke—and in this case drags down an absentminded freelancer with it. Moreover, the celebrities mentioned in this "tell-all" are so marginal and uninteresting, and the factoids about their experiences at the hotel even more so, that the piece even fails at its own shallow aims.

Perhaps as a sort of compensation for publishing such reprehensible gossip, ELI SANDERS attends a trial just like a big-boy reporter and scribbles about it. While the effort to dress oneself in pants and shirt and show up on time for a criminal case is commendable, Mr. Sanders dwells on every salacious detail of a rape trial for no convincingly worthy reason. This is outrageous and irresponsible journalism. Does it help the public in any way to understand every horrific event in a home invasion/rape/murder?

In arts, foppish dandy BRENDAN KILEY punishes the world at large by writing three—I repeat, three—arts stories this week. He blathers on about theater on the theater page, as he normally does. He (of course) invokes a Carl Sandburg poem while "reviewing" a Chicago- themed eatery, because his pretentiousness has never met bounds it couldn't leap over. And in the music section, he dithers about rock-and-roll concerts he attended in his youth, long before he had the job of filling pages of The Stranger with the boring contents of his life. Let us hope that "burnout" soon sets in as a result of all this overextension and he resigns his position posthaste, leaving him time to begin the arduous work of composing his memoirs (and if he does take the aforedescribed course of action, may I suggest the title The Mirror Is My Love: A Windbag Gazes into the Void Within?).

Elsewhere, briefly. CITY: The news "reporters" gush over unqualified newcomers vying for a spot on the Seattle City Council because said newcomers happen to flatter The Stranger's biases... VISUAL ART: Miss Graves attempts to explicate the paintings of an "artist" who is apparently critical of a seaside town, an exercise in metamoronism if ever there was one... BOOKS: The outgoing books intern writes an erotic letter that, thanks to the Google, will be attached to her name forever, the poor thing... SPORTS BLOTTER: Disgusting.